Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

‘But, Maestro,’ I said, ‘there’s still room for passion and intelligence. You of all people—’

‘There is passion and intelligence,’ he interrupted, ‘but there is no language for expressing them.’

‘English,’ I suggested.

He laughed. ‘Charlie, I always liked your sense of humour. You are still young,’ he said, clasping my arm: ‘find that language, express that passion.’ He started to cough violently. ‘Excuse me,’ he sighed. The two nurses, frowning at me significantly, guided him back indoors.

I stood alone for a long time, as if touched by destiny. I had been given my instructions by the Maestro: ‘find that language, express that passion.’ What perfect timing. I was alone in a hotel, where nobody knew how to get hold of me, and I could feel that last handful of Prozac evacuating my depressed body, like children in the Blitz. There was nothing to stop me writing until I dropped.

That evening in the dining room, with its panels of Zuber wallpaper disclosing a tropical landscape, as I sipped the best potage de légumes jardinières I have ever tasted, I felt myself slide into a more lugubrious rhythm. I started to write a note about the continuation of On the Train , when I was interrupted by a lively old countess with blue-rinse hair and wrinkles as fine as anything in a Holbein portrait. When she found out that I was a writer, she asked me if I used a pen or one of these new computers she had read so much about.

I told her that I cut open my wrist and collected the blood in my cupped hand and, using a six-inch nail, scratched out my sanguine words on the hides of snow leopards.

That shut her up.

This morning a funeral hearse arrived at the back of the hotel.

‘ Madame la comtesse est morte ,’ explained the concierge, drawing the side of his hand slowly across his throat and letting his tongue hang out, in case I didn’t understand French.

I was overwhelmed with guilt. Why had I been so unfriendly to that vivacious old blue-rinse? Now she was dead and it was no use offering her a Kir royale before lunch. It’s not enough to live each day as if it’s your last, unless you remember that it’s everybody else’s last day as well. The grief a loving son would feel, and of which I had no inkling when my own mother was lowered into her flinty grave, tornadoed through me at the news of the countess’s death.

‘All one can do is set an example,’ my mother used to say.

‘Or make an example of someone else,’ my father would add.

And it was all they could do.

Sometimes wild ideas were in the air. ‘People did things with tremendous style in those days,’ my mother occasionally remarked, but it turned out that these stylish people simply travelled with an unusual amount of luggage, or had allowed themselves to take a favourite terrier on a military campaign, and that, in any case, ‘those days’ were hopelessly remote from life in our Tudor farmhouse in Staffordshire.

I once dared to complain that I had been brought close to breakdown by my parents’ exemplary deadness.

‘You seem to have turned out perfectly all right,’ said my mother tranquilly.

‘Perfectly all right,’ said my father, in a tone which suggested that ‘all right’ was all wrong.

As I wept in the garden of the hotel, I realized that I was not crying for the countess or for my mother, but with frustration at not having had a mother who deserved my tears. I dread the prospect of the pressure of death roaming through my psyche like a wildcat prospector and producing these eruptions of unwelcome insight. I wish my mother had been right when she accused me of not wanting to ‘make a contribution’. It would be so lovely to be good at doing nothing, but nothing is the one thing I cannot do.

Later, I saw the Maestro leave for Rome in a black Lamborghini. I couldn’t help noticing that his chauffeur was dressed as one of the charioteers in Ben Hur . There’s nobody quite like the Maestro. My helplessness prevented me from saying goodbye, but his departure added to the determination of my melancholy.

Feeling too upset to write, I made the brave decision to write about feeling too upset. At that precise moment when I was majestically uncapping my pen, a strikingly beautiful woman walked into the bar, where, despite my liver condition, I had just finished my seventh espresso.

Her hazel eyes threw out sparks of green fire from behind the loose spirals of her golden-brown hair. We looked at each other with unassailable hunger, knowing that sex would only usher us into an Ethiopia of desire where we would taste even more keenly the tragic knowledge that true intimacy cannot be shared.

Who ever allowed a little thing like that to interfere with a fuck?

On the contrary, our tragic lucidity and, of course, the frantically life-affirming atmosphere of a recent death stimulated us to a savage interrogation of each other’s bodies. She drew blood with her nails and sucked the wounds like the flavour from a water ice. I rolled my forehead against hers, trying to break through the fortress of our lonely skulls and meld our yearning minds. We thrashed like marlin caught on the hooks of each other’s unforgiving genitals.

‘It’s incredible how I can feel you in my cunt,’ she said. ‘I can feel your passion and your intelligence.’

At least I think that’s what she said. French is not a language I claim to understand perfectly. For all I know she was saying, ‘For God’s sake get off me, I’ve got to get home and make dinner for my husband.’

And so the Maestro has left, without leaving behind any more detailed instructions to shape my destiny. The countess is dead, depriving me of one of those rich friendships that two people, no longer in perfect health, strike up in a luxury hotel. An opportunity to look back on two lives and decide that, on balance, they were very much worth living: all that’s gone down the drain. And I’ve had sex with a stranger. I’m burning through my options fast. Soon there’ll be nothing left to do but write.

This morning I am certain that the last traces of Prozac have been exiled by my imperious sadness. Why not get some more? Why not be a little lenient? Why not go and play blackjack in Monte Carlo, or visit Luxor? Why not invite a friend to share my five-star decline?

I drive myself to the edge because it is where I already am, stranded on a narrow atoll between what is not worth saying and what cannot be said, dead language and lost love on one side, silence and death on the other. The people I love are already out of reach, guarded by a jealous mother, or married to somebody else. And my friends would only try to console me. As to death, the only thing everyone manages to agree on is that this particular body, through which I have registered everything I know, whether it was hard-wired or acquired, generated or received, by chance or by design, freely or not, this particular body will end. Even fans of the near-death experience need a central nervous system to experience their disembodiment. Whatever death brings, it will not be the potage de légumes jardinières I enjoyed on Monday night, or yesterday’s astonishing carnal adventure. Whatever may be left will be alien to the person I am now, and so only the part of me that is acquainted with strangeness will not be distracted by death. When he was dying, Molière asked for red wine and ripe cheese; Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, asked for mescaline. One can’t be too careful in such an extreme situation, and I intend to have a slap-up dinner followed by a strong dose of mescaline.

In the meantime, I will continue On the Train . I want to know what’s been going on all these years. I’ve thought that I was having consciousness and now it turns out I don’t know what that means. I think I’ll just introduce a new character. There’s no time for bridge passages with a five-month deadline.